When you are lucky enough to travel and visit with librarians all over the world, you realize the power and the talents of our community.

One thing is clear to me: as librarians, we haven’t yet leveraged our true power as global connectors.  Lately I’ve been thinking about our yet-to-be-realized opportunities and how we might realize them.

You see, I see convergence.

Never before have we had truly effective tools for synchronous conferencing and media-rich asynchronous group discussion. Never before have we been able to leverage our emerging online communities of practice.   Never before has participation been so possible.  Never before has our world been so flat. Never before has it be more obvious that the prefix geo might amplify themes in any curriculum.

One of the titles in Heidi Hayes Jacobs’ recent Contemporary Perspectives on Literacy series is Global Literacy.  This video introduction describes how the author/editor sees the intersection of three critical literacies: digital literacy, media literacy and global literacy.

Jacobs defines global literacy as the ability to be a fluent investigator of the world, to be able to examine different perspectives, to be able to report on and share ideas, and to take action on those ideas.  Being globally literate requires learners to be able to collect meaningful information about people and places and personalize what they are learning.